Rakuten Symphony, a newly formed corporation following a formal split from its Rakuten parent, needs money, vested partners, or both. It could also be headed for an initial public offering. 

The company houses Rakuten Communications Platform (RCP), including the recently acquired Altiostar, and Rakuten’s various open radio access network (RAN) technology assets and services. 

When Rakuten introduced Rakuten Symphony two months ago, still under the umbrella of Rakuten Mobile and the Japanese e-commerce giant, executives described it as a move designed to position RCP for expansion and a broader adoption of its pre-integrated services from global operators. 

“It is our aim to create the world’s largest cloud-native telco platform provider,” Tareq Amin, CTO at Rakuten Mobile who now concurrently serves as CEO at Rakuten Symphony, said at the time.

Rakuten founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani claims RCP revenue and profit could outpace all of Rakuten’s other businesses in five to 10 years, adding that the total addressable market could be as high as $150 billion in 2025. Rakuten reported $13.2 billion in revenue in 2020.

That astronomical prediction is probably “based on an assumption that open RAN will take significant share from traditional RAN infrastructure providers, but Nokia in particular is also bullish on open RAN and has more experience, resources, and IP to lean into,” noted Will Townsend, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

He points to Nokia as the biggest competitive threat to Rakuten Symphony, adding “it’s not clear to me that Rakuten is delivering significant differentiation unless it can prove a performance-optimized solution that is inherently cost optimized.”

Despite Rakuten’s pioneering ways in open RAN, it and the technology itself has much to prove outside of Japan. Of the 167 live 5G networks in operation today, Rakuten Mobile stands alone in delivering 5G service via open RAN.

The operator believes it’s “innovating in the space, given its first-to-market adoption of open RAN but mobile network operators are highly competitive and may not consider their platform,” Townsend said.

Moreover, greenfield status remains a pre-qualification of sorts for wide scale 5G open RAN deployments. Global operators such as Telefónica have pledged to transition to open RAN, but commercial availability is another matter. 

Dish Network, an aspiring greenfield operator in the U.S., has repeatedly delayed the deployment and commercialization of its 5G open RAN. RCP’s first and only public customer comes in the form of another greenfield operator, Germany’s 1&1 Drillisch. 

Beyond that, Amin recently claimed Rakuten Symphony is in “advanced talks” with 27 prospective customers in the U.S., 22 in the Asia-Pacific region, 19 in Europe, 11 in the Middle East and Africa, and five in Russia.

Indeed, much remains to be seen from Rakuten Symphony and its moat of software and hardware partners supporting open RAN. Until Rakuten proves itself with operators in other markets, predictions would be premature, Townsend concluded.